Aerospace and Defense Marketing

The One Marketing & PR Book Defense Contractors Should Read

Amidst a rapidly changing defense industry, a growing number of defense contractors are successfully harnessing the current revolution in marketing. Here’s the field manual.

With so much change happening now in the marketing world, I am often asked by friends, business executives and marketing professionals about how to keep up with the latest in marketing. This question gets asked with increasing frequency because so many of the traditional marketing tactics are waning in effectiveness. I always respond that if you only read one marketing book, readThe New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR is the field manual for the future of marketing. It is an international bestseller with more than 300,000 copies sold in over 25 languages (from Bulgarian to Vietnamese). First published in 2007, its 4th edition will be released in July, 2013. The book offers step-by-step instructions (like any good field manual) for harnessing the power of modern marketing and PR to communicate with buyers directly, raise visibility, and increase sales. The New Rules of Marketing & PR shows how any type of organization can leverage Web-based content to get the right information to the right people at the right time – for a fraction of the cost of traditional big-budget marketing campaigns. These new rules of marketing and PR apply to defense contractors, too. David Meerman Scott, on his blog, WebInkNow, outlines how Raytheon has taken a content marketing approach to public relations. Raytheon has hired former journalists who use the same newsroom skills honed as reporters (e.g. investigating, creating content, editing, meeting deadlines), to execute what Scott describes as a “real-time marketing & PR” approach. And it’s working: journalists and Pentagon officials pay attentionto what Raytheon is publishing, and frequently use the content. To read Scott’s full article on Raytheon’s “new” marketing, click through to the article here.

Web Ink Now: How Raytheon implemented a brand journalism approach to content marketingI’m always fascinated by organizations that embrace brand journalism, hiring reporters to create content that serves as marketing and public relations. For almost a decade, I’ve recommended that companies of all kinds model their sites not on their peers’ boring old brochure-like approach but rather aspire to becoming like a media site such as Forbes, the BBC, or The New York Times and that they actually hire reporters and editors, not marketers and copywriters, to produce the content.

Question: What marketing challenges as a defense contractor are you facing? Please join the conversation with a comment below. And if you found this article helpful, please share it with your network via the social media buttons below.